[Building Sakai] usage of

Mark J. Norton markjnorton at earthlink.net
Wed Jan 2 07:51:05 PST 2013


Well, Axis2 does have provisions for accessing remote services via both 
REST and SOAP.  With a suitable front end, this could include API access 
as well, as long as the services are local to the server.  Synapse is 
the logical successor to Axis, I believe.  Regardless, the concept is to 
hide transport and request mechanisms behind an API.  Work would be 
needed on the client side to enable access via JavaScript, JQuery, etc.

- Mark

On 1/2/2013 10:41 AM, Matthew Jones wrote:
> I think Apache Axis is just about SOAP web services? Perhaps you were 
> referring to Apache Synapse? (http://synapse.apache.org/) In any case, 
> I agree there would be substantial work/changes to get that working, 
> especially since the services aren't stateless, aren't 
> often inherently secure, and aren't entirely complete without the 
> view. If you look at the current web services and rest end points, 
> lots of additional code besides just service calls had to have been 
> implemented in these to achieve desired results.
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 10:33 AM, Mark J. Norton 
> <markjnorton at earthlink.net <mailto:markjnorton at earthlink.net>> wrote:
>
>     >  It's hard to support multiple interfaces though (internal,
>     external REST, external SOAP) since you have to make sure to keep
>     them all tested and in sync.
>
>     I believe that there have been attempts by other projects to
>     provide a framework that would unify interfaces and remote
>     information requests.  The Apache Axis projects is an example, I
>     think.  It would, however, require some pretty substantial changes
>     to the Sakai architecture to fully realize the advantages of such
>     an approach.  Enterprise Service Buses provide some of this kind
>     of capability, too.
>
>     - Mark
>
>
>     On 1/2/2013 10:13 AM, Matthew Jones wrote:
>>     Also, most tools have very limited capabilities via REST. When
>>     Sakai was developed in 2005, the concept of REST was around, but
>>     it didn't really get popular in the world until 2008-2010. Sakai
>>     uses all internal apis for performance convenience.All of the
>>     initial tools were written mostly by the same small team. Around
>>     2008, Entitybroker was created to serve these internal 'entities'
>>     and additional methods to the external interfaces via REST, but
>>     that didn't get a whole lot of initial support other than from
>>     the creator (Aaron Z) until lately. There is a a reasonably large
>>     effort that was started, mostly around creating new interfaces
>>     for mobile, which started late last year. I wonder how that's
>>     progressing?
>>     https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/MOBILE/Home
>>
>>     It's hard to support multiple interfaces though (internal,
>>     external REST, external SOAP) since you have to make sure to keep
>>     them all tested and in sync. In Sakai much of the business logic
>>     is in the view for some tools, not in the service which also
>>     complicates things.
>>
>>
>>     On Wed, Jan 2, 2013 at 9:34 AM, Bryan Holladay
>>     <holladay at longsight.com <mailto:holladay at longsight.com>> wrote:
>>
>>         Some of the REST urls are used as redirects for tools like LB
>>         and internal links.  For the Forums example:
>>
>>         /direct/forum and /direct/forum_topic are used to redirect a
>>         user's browser to the forum or topic in the UI.
>>
>>         If you want a data format, then you can use /direct/topic like:
>>
>>         http://nightly2.sakaiproject.org:8082/direct/topic/site/791daf20-c980-4f43-911b-1ed97d5727f1.json
>>
>>         This gives you the details for all forums and topics in that
>>         site.
>>
>>         -Bryan
>>
>>
>>         On Mon, Dec 31, 2012 at 12:26 PM, Gregory Guthrie
>>         <guthrie at mum.edu <mailto:guthrie at mum.edu>> wrote:
>>
>>             I see several webServices interfaces and it is not so
>>             obvious to me how to use them. Steve has pointed me to
>>             some examples in perl and Python for a few of them, but
>>             if people really use these, are there more examples
>>             around that could help understand usage?
>>
>>             Right now I am trying  to poke at them using a REST
>>             interface from  the web just to see how to use them, and
>>             to avoid the issues of programmatic logins for now. I’m
>>             particularly interested in any REST usage of these via
>>             web or curl.
>>
>>             Also, if the interface says: “No Formats allowed” for
>>             both input and outputs, how does one get the results?
>>
>>             As a specific example, the /direct/forum/ interface, what
>>             does it do? How to use it?
>>
>>             -------------------------------------------
>>
>>
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